DENVER — Democrats ripped into Senator McCain as indifferent to the plight of the working class and an ally of big oil on today, launching wave after wave of attacks from the podium of their national convention.

“If he’s the answer, then the question must be ridiculous,” Governor Paterson said of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

By contrast, a party elder, Ted Sorensen, said “we have the man we need at last to embrace the future, not the past, and to dispel eight years of pain and shame. Barack Obama is his name. Call the roll!”

Not yet.

Senator Obama’s formal nomination was set for tomorrow night. First came Senator Clinton, his tenacious rival in a riveting battle for the nomination, who was closing out her own history-making quest for the White House.

Despite lingering unhappiness among some delegates nursing grievances over Mrs. Clinton’s loss, the party chairman, Governor Dean, declared the convention determined to make Mr. Obama the nation’s first black president. “There is not a unity problem. If anyone doubts that, wait till you see Hillary Clinton’s speech,” he said.

The former Virginia governor, Mark Warner, was tapped to deliver the keynote address on the convention’s second night. It was the same assignment that Mr. Obama — then an Illinois state lawmaker running for the Senate — used four years ago to launch his astonishing ascent in national politics.

Mr. Obama campaigned in Missouri as he slowly made his way toward the convention city. Speaking to airline workers in a giant hangar, he accused the Bush administration of failing to enforce health and safety laws and said Mr. McCain “doesn’t get it” when it comes to the concerns of blue collar workers.

There was more of the same — much more — as a parade of speakers criticized Mr. McCain at the convention several hundred miles away.

The president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Cecile Richards, said the Republican has voted against “real sex education, voted against affordable family planning. And if elected, John McCain has vowed to appoint Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade,” she said, referring to the landmark 1973 case that affirmed women’s right to abortion.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland focused on economic issues. “While families are losing sleep tonight trying to figure out some way to make their paycheck stretch through one more day, John McCain is sleeping better than ever,” he said, recalling that McCain had recently said Americans were better off because of President Bush’s policies.

And Governor Culver of Iowa said oil companies were “placing their bets on John McCain, bankrolling his campaign and gambling with our future.”

“John McCain offers four more years of the same Bush-Cheney policies that have failed us,” Senator Leahy of Vermont summed up.